short fiction · 2026-10-29

Seventeen Endings: The Marginalia Continue

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

Ending twelve: the heroine forgives. She folds her hands, smiles, says "I understand." The Underground Man writes: She understands nothing. She performs understanding. The performance is the cruelty. He has known women who understood — they understood how to destroy him with a glance, a silence, a kindness offered at the wrong angle. Forgiveness is not a gift; it is a ledger. She writes him down in the credit column and calls it love.

Ending thirteen: the villain repents. He falls to his knees, weeps, names every sin. The margin: Repentance is the villain's final triumph. He makes his crime about him — his sorrow, his growth, his redemption. The victim becomes a prop in his salvation. I would rather the villain laugh. At least laughter is honest.

Ending fourteen: the child survives. The bomb misses the school. The margin: The child survives to become me. To sit in a damp room at forty, rewriting other people's endings because he cannot write his own. Survival is not mercy. Mercy would have been the bomb.

Ending fifteen: the lovers reunite. Years apart, a chance meeting, rain on the pavement, "I never stopped." The margin: They never stopped because they never started. They loved the idea of each other — the safe, distant, unknowable idea. Proximity ruins it. Proximity is where the smell of breath and the sound of chewing and the petty cruelties live. Let them stay apart. Let them die writing letters that never arrive.

Ending sixteen: the truth comes out. The conspiracy unravels, the guilty are named, justice is served. The margin: Truth is a story the powerful tell when they have already won. The guilty are named so the system can survive. Justice is the price the system pays to keep running. I know. I have watched it run.

Ending seventeen: the book ends. The last page turns. Silence. The margin: No. The book does not end. I am still here. I am the ending you could not write. I am the reader who refuses to close the cover. I am the ink bleeding through the page, the hand that will not stop writing, the voice that says: give me an eighteenth. Give me a nineteenth. Give me the ending where nothing resolves, nothing heals, nothing means — and I am still here, writing, spiteful, alive.